NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8281652" data-attributes="member: 18">Yeah, sorry if I overstated, I'm not saying it was never used in a derogatory way in the 1990s, it was. Sometimes as you say, it was used as a synonym for munchkin (usually by older people, now that I think about it - of course "older people" was "over 25" back then lol), or just in an insulting way, but so were a lot of terms. There was huge sneering at the cooperative storytelling stuff emerging in games (very different to Blacow's definition) too in the earlier 1990s, with a lot of people basically implying that unless you had a DM solidly in charge of everything happening in the game, it was terrible (you still see ghosts of that from time to time even now). But it transformed in usage over the 1990s, for sure, and by the 2000s definitely wasn't an insult for many people. Nor is min-maxer or optimizer, though there are people who freak out when those terms are mentioned. Usually, in my experience, because they're total min-maxers, and that doesn't fit with their self-image as "real roleplayers" or the like, something I've never fully understood.Yeah, it doesn't seem like something you can cure "supply side". I do think it's worth eliminating some of the pointless plethora of options in certain games. 3E and 4E could both have lost 70-80% of their Feats (across all books/supplements - a much smaller proportion in core books) and nothing of value would have been lost (same with 3E PrCs). But those were mostly bad and not likely to be causing analysis paralysis. To cure that I think requires a different mind-set and self-work, a willingness to do things like break down a problem and apply spreadsheets and pro/con lists and so on (I have helped people with it before, though not as related to TT RPGs). It also requires the person to want to overcome it. I know a couple of terminal ditherers (not in my main RPG group though), and both of them actually, on some level, enjoy dithering and debating and considering and re-considering, so they may moan about how long it takes them to decide things, but they never make any efforts to speed up or sharpen their decision-making process. I don't fault 'em, they both like what they like, but I do feel like the "I'm such a ditherer!" is almost a boast sometimes lol.</blockquote>

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